Andrew Allen Week Day 2: Exclusive Interview

Welcome back to the latest installment of Vans Rider Week. This week we focus on The Mayor of San Juan Capistrano, Anti Hero pro, Andrew Allen. A few months back Andrew had to get his ankle scoped due to a major slam on a hubba and has been sidelined since. Thankfully, when we caught up with him for this exclusive interview he was back on his board and back on the road with his Anti Hero teammates heading to Texas, working on filming for his Vans and Anti Hero parts. Yesterday you got a refresher course on Andrew with his past interviews, today we catch up with him to see what he’s been up to lately.


Where you at right now?
I’m currently on an Anti Hero road trip out to the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. I’m not exactly sure what town I’m in right now. I think we’re about 200 miles away. We’re about to drive the rest of the way to Austin. Thrasher is having some event with music and a ramp jam. We’re just checking that out and doing a skate trip and also take some pictures and get some video. I’m not sure what the photos will be used for but we have been filming for a possible little Anti Hero project. It’s all still up in the air but we’ve definitely been on a few trips in the past year or so and Dan Wolfe has been doing the video stuff so hopefully we can make something cool happen.

Are you back on your board?
A little bit. I recently had to get a quick, little ankle cleaning out surgery about two months ago so I’ve been doing physical therapy and slowly but surely getting back on the old skateboard.

How’s that feel?
Some days it feels good, other days not so much.

What caused you to have to get surgery?
I’m sure it’s just wear and tear over the years but I was trying to skate this hubba ledge and I lost control and came down super-hard on my right foot. At the time I thought I had bruised my heel or something but after two weeks my ankle was still swollen. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with it and eventually I got an MRI and they found out there were loose bodies, pieces of broken off cartilage and possibly bone that were right in the joint. So they went in there arthroscopically and took all those things out and did some clean up in there.

Nothing was broken or rebuilt? They just cleaned up?
Yeah, they didn’t have to cut me open or rebuild anything. It was just a clean up.

You always fall like a ton of bricks; do you ever not fall super-hard?
Uh…no. Obviously I eat shit a lot. I could fall slowly and gracefully but usually I just hit the ground hard and bounce.



You were weighing in at 180lbs when I interviewed you in 2009. What are you now after surgery?
I think about the same. I don’t really know; I haven’t been on a scale. I have no clue. But I haven’t been sitting in my room just eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. I’ve been doing physical therapy three days a week and riding my bike and trying to stay active so I don’t barrel out.

I read in your recent Transworld Interview that you attempted to become an artist. How’d that go?
That was pretty much a total joke. I was like, “Maybe I can try to do something creative.” So I went to the art store, bought a bunch of supplies and cleared off my desk and drew one picture and I got over it.

What did you draw?
It was a wine bottle and a pack of cigarettes and it said, “The true path through wisdom is excess.” I stole that from a Jack Kerouac quote and then I felt really stupid so I closed the book and haven’t tried since.

Any chance you’ll attend community college for some art classes?
Probably not. I wouldn’t be opposed to it but it’s just one of those things where you can talk about shit all you want but when it comes down to it you have to have some creative expression.

Did you show anyone the picture?
No. Obviously doodling and stuff is cool but I wasn’t trying to be serious. I didn’t have a beret on, sitting in my room with a little moustache going to town on some canvas.

This Anti Hero trip you’re on right now are you in tents? Back of trains? Or back of a pick up truck?
No, we’ve been actually staying at some hotels, taking a couple days trying to drive out Austin. Those guys drove down from San Francisco and picked me up in Southern California and we went to Arizona, stayed there, and then we went to Silver City, New Mexico, which was a pretty cool, trippy old town where Billy The Kid was hanging out. Yesterday we tried to push it and did eight hours and then put it down in some hotel room. Apparently this SXSW thing we’re going to is like 100,000 people and bands are playing, so somehow we got this backyard to sleep in that’s in the city because there’s nowhere to stay since the city is so crazy. So yeah, we’re going to have to put the tents up. But the weather is looking kind of crazy today; hopefully it doesn’t rain because that isn’t too fun when camping.

What’s been the highlight of the trip so far?
We skated two pretty cool pools in the Phoenix area. Little Robbie Russo found this one pool that was just perfect for him; it was like four feet and had super-smooth trannies. It was pretty rad to watch him bounce around off the walls and rip that thing.



What’s been your favorite Anti Hero trip overall?
That’s a hard question because every trip is fun and has its own highlights but I’d say the coolest one has to be when we went to Cuba three or four years ago before you could go there legally. I was kind of tripping and sketching. We had to fly through the Cayman Islands and from there jump on another flight. Then we got there and we didn’t now anybody. We heard Joe Brook and a couple other people had been there a few weeks before. We just all showed up with our backpacks and skateboards at the skatespot and looked for a skater. One finally came and he called the one main guy, Che, and he let us stay at his house the first night, which was weird because he was saying that if he got caught he could go to jail. From there someone set us up to stay with this little old lady, who must’ve been like 90 years old, in this huge house that she had and we had to pay her $15 to stay there for four nights. It was pretty interesting to go somewhere that’s trapped in a whole other time essentially. It was all old cars and a totally different world. And there was cool stuff to skate out there as well.



I went to Cuba not long after yous guys. What was the reaction you were getting from locals? Because they’re kind of freaked by being seen with Americans.
Yeah, definitely. A lot of the people don’t see Americans often or at all and skating is not that big there so that’s another thing that attracts them to look at you. But for the most part everyone was really nice. We didn’t have any problems. It was just different. You’d go to the park and you’d see 100 people just yelling at each other, screaming. You’re like, “What’s going on over there? They fighting?” Then you find out they’re just arguing over baseball. About stats and whatever else. They like their baseball and they just sit there and just yell and scream about it.

The locals told me yous guys tore through there like a tornado.
That could be a conception, yeah. I was chilling but some people might not have necessarily backed what some of my associates were up to while we were out there. There was one night when we went out and there’s this photo of me and Frank [Gerwer] in these weird flamingo suits. We went out drinking and met some guy who was like, “Come back to my house. I got these chicks coming over.” We went over there and it was pretty sketchy, next thing you know we’re listening to music and me and Frank have some flamingo suits on dancing. The chicks never showed up.



You were talking about your art space, do you still live at home with your folks?
Yeah, I’ve been trying to save up money. After this April when I give this money to the taxman I’m looking into maybe buying a place. But I don’t know. Everything is just depending on me growing up and making some moves, some life hammers.

Dude, growing up sucks.
Damn.

Nobody washes your clothes anymore.
I don’t wash my clothes anyway so I’m fine.

Oh, then you’re going to love it! Are you trying to move out of San Juan Capistrano? Or is there an invisible wall around the town for you?
Obviously, that’s where my home is and I really like it down there. I have all my friends and family there. It’s easy. I live close to the beach. I could definitely see myself growing old there but at this time it might be better for skating if I moved somewhere closer to the Los Angeles area because that’s where the action is at. With working on the Vans video with Greg Hunt and Cody Green, they both live up there. There’s a lot of skating going on there but at the same time I don’t know if I want to move into that strange world of traffic and people. So ideally I would like to get a place in San Juan Capistrano but I don’t know what the reality of that is.



How was the filming for the Vans video going before you had surgery?
It was going pretty good. We went on a trip to Europe over the summer and we’ve been going on trips the last three or four years with the intention of starting to do a video. So I think that everyone has a bit of a base of footage but now it’s time to get more stuff and better stuff and just really try to push yourself.

Any pressure on you knowing that they’re trying to do an Anti Hero project as well as the Vans video?
Yeah, maybe a little bit but it’s all good for you. It’s only going to push you to skate harder and try to progress.

Is your approach different from one video to another?
Not necessarily. I just try to ride my skateboard and do whatever is fun for me and skate different stuff. I don’t really doing anything different for one or the other. Obviously the videos will definitely look different. Anti Hero has their style of how they do stuff and Greg has a vision for how he wants the Vans video to look.

You were talking about traveling for the Vans video. Tell me about the China trip for the Stage 4.
That was cool. That was some time in November and we went to Hong Kong and all over. We did some demos and it was really cool, I think skateboarding is relatively new in China so people are pretty curious about it and pretty excited to see you do anything on your board.



They seemed like they were tripping that day Gilbert gapped out to 5-0.
Oh yeah, that was insane. That was in Shanghai coming off a bus station or something. He got up there, standing on the wall and everybody starts looking like, “What’s this crazy little white kid doing?” Then he just did this weird Moses thing where he parted the sea and everybody moved. He went and jumped and gapped to 5-0 and no one had any clue what was going on. It was nuts. But the trip was to go out there and check out the ending stage of that Stage 4 shoe. So we went to the shoe factory and we got to watch them assemble one of the shoes. It was pretty trippy seeing the whole process go down. You don’t really realize it when you look down at your shoes but they pass through about 100 people’s hands. The assembly line was like boom, boom, boom; it was pretty rad to watch it. [More photos from the Vans factory can be seen on Anthony Acosta’s site. The full skate article will appear in the next issue of The Skateboard Mag.]

How was the process of making that shoe?
It was pretty rad. I was stoked on the whole thing. They approached myself, Chima, Gilbert and Chris like, “We want to do this thing with you guys. Let’s sit down and start from scratch and get your full input and put together a shoe that everyone is into.” That was over the course of a year and a half and all the different stages, every time we’d get a revised shoe we’d skate it and talk about what we liked and didn’t like, what we wanted to modify…and I think it turned out pretty cool. Hopefully other people like it as well.

Alien just put out an ad announcing Gilbert is finally pro.
I always thought he was pro. He’s like the best skater ever. That’s awesome. I’m happy for him.



You and Omar Hassan have two of the most annoying names on the Vans team for me. I have the entire team plugged into Google Alerts so every time your name is mentioned on the Internet I get a notice. Omar shares the same name with the leader of Sudan so I get hundreds of emails a day with the wrong Omar Hassan. And for you I always get some random ones. Did you know there’s a Canadian R&B Singer named Andrew Allen that’s huge?
I’ve never heard of him. Is he good? I’ll have to look him up on YouTube to see what this dude is all about. Running my name like that he better be making hits.



Another good one was a couple weeks ago I got a notice that an Andrew Allen had broken into a house and was caught butt naked, covered in peanut butter. Was that you?
No, that wasn’t me. You sent me that link and I looked at it and was laughing. The guy was covered in peanut butter and I think he wrote, ‘SORRY’on the ground in dishwashing detergent. I wish that was me. I can’t really come up with stuff that good.



I know you’re a big Point Break fan. Did you cry when Swayze died?
I didn’t necessarily cry but obviously it was a sad day for the world. And me especially. But the good die young, dog. Wait! When he died in the movie or when he died in real life?

Real life.
Yeah, no tears. Everyone saw it coming. It’s not like he died super suddenly, he had pancreatic cancer.

You doing anything personally to keep his memory alive?
I have an autographed picture in my room of Keanu and Swayze and sometimes I’ll just look at it and say a quick, little prayer. I don’t think it’s a real autograph. It’s definitely a print but whatever dude, I got it framed.